One of the very best atheist YouTube video makers now weighs in on morality: Your Thoughts?
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Category Archives: Philosophy
On the Rapture
May 20, 2011 – 6:26 pmThe rapture isn’t going to happen on 21 May 2011. And that implies an ordered series of disconfirmations: (1) Harold Camping is wrong about the Bible; (2) his way of reading the Bible (that is, Biblical numerology) does not reveal anything trans-scientific about the future; (3) evangelical ways of reading the Bible reveal nothing trans-scientific [...]
Questioning Forgiveness
May 17, 2011 – 8:16 amJames K. McNulty discusses the downside to forgiveness: Despite a burgeoning literature that documents numerous positive implications of forgiveness, scholars know very little about the potential negative implications of forgiveness. In particular, the tendency to express forgiveness may lead offenders to feel free to offend again by removing unwanted consequences for their behavior (e.g., anger, [...]
Synthese Intelligent Design Controversy
April 27, 2011 – 1:36 pmThe philosophy journal Synthese has become embroiled in a controversy regarding a special issue entitled “Evolution and its Rivals”. The chief editors of the journal have behaved in ways which have struck many philosophers as inappropriate. You can learn more about the controversy at the Leiter Report. If you’re an academic, you may wish to [...]
The Church of Google: Google is God
April 21, 2011 – 10:18 amMany thanks to Zike for pointing me to The Church of Google. The Church of Google website gives nine lovely arguments for the divinity of Google. The Church of Google website also gives excellent replies to objections against the divinity of Google. Brilliant! Guest Contributor Eric Steinhart is a professor of philosophy at William Paterson [...]
The Virtues Of Philosophizing Online
April 20, 2011 – 1:07 pmClaire Creffield has a rich meditation on the subject worth reading in full. Think about the forums for shared introspection that we have today. Online forums. At their best (and I am talking here only about our best experiences of online discourse: we know too well the mediocrity or worse that predominates), online forums have [...]
Blood Poisons The Purest Teaching
April 15, 2011 – 9:46 amOphelia Benson, PZ Myers, and Jerry Coyne are dismissing the bizarre notion that lacking the New Atheists somehow lack credibility for lacking martyrs. On this topic, Nietzsche has already far more eloquently said far more than I ever could: Zealously and with much shouting they drove their herd over their bridge: as if to the [...]
Singularitarianism as Religion Entails Testable Predictions
April 14, 2011 – 12:33 pmSingularitarianism is religious. Specifically, it is a kind of millenarian movement. It will therefore develop according to millenarian patterns. Millenarian movements can develop in several ways. The first way is good: the movement turns into a positive mature religion. The second way is bad: the movement turns into a self-destructive cult. The third way is [...]
The Singularity as Religion
April 11, 2011 – 1:34 pmI think much of the culture and discourse around the singularity is religious. I say this based in part on my reading of David Noble’s book The Religion of Technology and my reading of Robert Geraci’s Apocalyptic AI. Both are fantastic books. And I’ve compiled a long list of articles and books on technology and [...]
Lawrence Krauss Replies To William Lane Craig’s Crowing
April 5, 2011 – 10:20 amPhysicist Lawrence Krauss recently debated William Lane Craig and was appalled by both his tactics in the debate and his subsequent representations of it. Krauss is eager to get his own account of events to a wider audience, so in the interest of contributing to that end, I am reproducing it in full below. You [...]
Hello Nietzsche
March 24, 2011 – 11:09 amBuy one from the Unemployed Philosophers Guild (whose proceeds go to support unemployed philosophers. A most worthy cause). And via Malcolm, here’s an avatar version for your use on your Facebook (or other) profile! Your Thoughts?
On The Conflict Over The Meaning And Cultural Influence of Political Secularism
March 22, 2011 – 11:00 amIn this post I just want to jot down some thoughts about a knotty issue. I probably will not make much progress in untangling all its strands but hopefully will stimulate a discussion that straightens things out at least a bit. Is political secularism inherently neutral or antagonistic to religiosity? There are a couple of [...]
Norway’s State Philosopher
March 20, 2011 – 11:48 amBelow is some of Michael Moore’s documentary footage which he cut from Sicko. He explores Norway’s exceedingly high standard of living and the values which produce it. Along the way he talks to Hynrik Syse, the philosopher who the government hired to manage the nation’s oil profits so that they would be used in the wisest [...]
George Carlin Flawlessly Combines Comedy With Philosophy: The 10 Commandments
March 13, 2011 – 9:30 pmGeorge Carlin is the greatest comedian of our time. He flawlessly combines philosophy, insight, and comedy. This is a huge achievement. Bill Hicks is the only other philosopher-comedian that even comes close to combining great comedy with decent philosophy, but very few comedians even try. Below is an example of Carlin’s greatness, his “10 Commandments” [...]
Philosophy Can Debunk Myths About Atheism
March 13, 2011 – 12:55 amMany people are taught many strange things about atheists. For example, supposedly atheists can’t be moral, can’t have a source of “meaning” in their lives, and can’t attain knowledge. Many atheists will say that they are being misrepresented by theists because they believe morality, meaning, and knowledge can exist without God. The theist might say, [...]
The Amazing Atheist Trashes ESP
March 11, 2011 – 8:19 pmThe Amazing Atheist is one of the greatest comedians of our time, but he hasn’t made it into the mainstream media. He not only trashes a “psychic” in this piece, but he explains what it means to be a reasonable person — and why a reasonable person would not believe in psychics. You can watch [...]
Atheistic Design Arguments
March 7, 2011 – 3:45 pmAll design arguments reason from the organization in our universe to the existence of some divine designer. What does this designer do? Design implies deliberate selection from a plurality of alternative possibilities. It cannot be selection from one possibility nor can it be random selection. It has to be rational selection. According to Leibniz, God [...]
The Atheistic Fine Tuning Argument
March 6, 2011 – 5:56 pmEvery one of the standard arguments for the existence of God can be reformulated as an argument against the existence of God. Consider the Fine Tuning Argument. The theistic version of the Fine Tuning Argument goes like this: (1) The Fine Tuning Argument is sound. (2) If the Fine Tuning Argument is sound, then there [...]
Daily Hilarity: God’s “Unconditional” Love
March 5, 2011 – 12:00 amThis pretty much sums it up: As I have argued before (in Conceptual Problems For The Ideal of Unconditional Love), I think anyone, not just the Christians, would have a hard time making a theory of unconditional love coherent. Your Thoughts?
Physics is Grounded in Mathematics
March 3, 2011 – 10:54 amMathematics is effective in science. Wigner (1960: 14) regards this effectiveness as magical: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” The prudent reply that it is surely not very scientific to base scientific reasoning [...]
Disambiguating Faith: Why You Cannot Prove Inductive Reasoning Is Faith-Based Reasoning But Instead Only Assert That By Faith
March 3, 2011 – 10:16 amIn the comments section of a post I asserted that, “We can say we know induction works to a high degree of certainty.” James Sweet, of No Jesus, No Peas, responds: How do we know that? The only reasons I can come up with rely either on inductive reasoning — circular argument. Remember also that [...]
On Zealously, Tentatively, and Perspectivally Holding Viewpoints
March 2, 2011 – 4:13 pmIn a recent post, I wrote the following: Changing people’s minds to make them stop holding positions dogmatically and instead hold them tentatively is still a change of mind one may zealously pursue. On Facebook, Greg writes in reply: I want to address the peculiarity of this statement. One may passionately pursue such a change [...]
Can Atheists do Math?
March 2, 2011 – 10:05 amLeibniz’s version of the cosmological argument (his Sufficient Reason Argument) runs from the continency of our universe to the existence of some necessary being. This necessary being is the ground of our universe. The ground isn’t part of our universe – it stands in no spatial, temporal, or causal relation to any thing in our [...]
The Flexibility of the Word “Evangelical”
March 1, 2011 – 7:11 pmIn a previous post, I conceded that it was acceptable to call at least some activist atheists like me “evangelical atheists” on some possible senses of the word “evangelical”. Greg wanted to say that this could not be so because all that atheists do (or should) advocate is tentative, skeptical empiricism, and that we do not (or should [...]
Atheism and Leibniz
February 28, 2011 – 7:18 pmThe cosmological argument is really a family of arguments. Some of the cosmological arguments are very concrete. Aquinas’s Second Way and the Kalam Argument (popularized by William Lane Craig) reason back to some first cause of the universe at the beginning of time. Atheists (like Quentin Smith) have given various replies to these first cause [...]
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